Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna. And
today we'll start with the exciting news of a
new interstellar visitor. Only the third ever
confirmed to be zooming through our solar
system. Then we'll explore NASA's
SphereX mission which is creating an all sky
map of the universe, making its data
publicly accessible. Next,
prepare for a mind bending story about a self
destructive exoplanet. An astonishing
discovery. We'll also dive into the latest
revelations from the James Webb Space
Telescope, which continues to reshape our
view of cosmic history. And finally, we'll
uncover a surprising twist how Earth's
very own weather satellites are now helping
us study Venus.
Let's get started. Our first
stop today is an exciting new celestial
visitor. Astronomers have just confirmed the
discovery of an interstellar object, space
speeding through our solar system. This marks
only the third time humanity has detected an
object that originated beyond our own stellar
neighbourhood. The Visitor, officially
named 3i Atlas by the International
Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre, has
been classified as a comet. Its
fuzziness, as described by astronomer
Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard
Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, suggests
it's primarily made of ice rather than rock.
While its exact size is still being refined,
current estimates place it at roughly 10 to
20 kilometres wide, which would make it the
largest interstellar interloper ever
detected. However, if it's truly made of ice,
it could be smaller since ice reflects more
light, making it appear larger.
Regardless of its precise dimensions, it
poses absolutely no threat to Earth.
Richard Moisel, head of Planetary defence at
the European Space Agency, assures us it will
fly deep through our solar system, passing
just inside the orbit of Mars without any
collision risk. What makes 3i
Atlas so fascinating is its incredible speed.
Zooming along at more than 60 kilometres per
second, or about 37 miles per second,
this phenomenal velocity means it isn't
gravitationally bound by the sun. Unlike
comets and asteroids that originate from
within our solar system, its trajectory
clearly indicates it's from interstellar
space and will continue on its journey back
out into the galaxy once it passes us.
Astronomers theorise that these icy wanderers
form around other star systems. As another
star passes nearby, its gravitational tug can
free these ice balls, sending them rogue into
the galaxy. This newly discovered comet is
simply one that happens to be passing through
our cosmic backyard. The object
was initially spotted by the NASA funded
ATLAS survey in Hawaii. Professional and
amateur astronomers worldwide then joined
forces, digging through past telescope data
to trace its path back to at least mid June.
It's expected to get brighter and closer to
the sun until late October and will remain
observable by telescope into next year.
To put this discovery into perspective, the
first interstellar object, Oumuamua,
was detected in 2017 and was so
peculiar it even led some scientists to
speculate about alien origins, though this
theory has since been largely dismissed. Our
second visitor, 2i Borisov, was
observed in 2019. Mark Norris, an
astronomer at the University of Central
Lancashire in the UK, notes that 3i
Atlas appears to be moving considerably
faster than its two predecessors. While it's
currently roughly the distance of Jupiter
away from Earth and primarily visible in the
southern hemisphere, its presence is
incredibly significant. Scientists
estimate that as many as 10,000 interstellar
objects might be drifting through our solar
system at any given time, though most are
likely much smaller. This new detection
suggests that observatories like the newly
online Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile
could soon be finding these dim interstellar
visitors on a monthly basis.
Unfortunately, sending a mission to intercept
3i Atlas isn't feasible due to its speed and
trajectory. However, these rare
visitors offer scientists an unparalleled
opportunity to study material from outside
our solar system. Imagine if we could detect
precursors of life like, um, amino acids on
such an object. It would give us immense
confidence that the conditions for life exist
in other star systems across the universe.
Moving from interstellar visitors to an
ambitious new mission let's talk about NASA's
Sphere X telescope. Launched in March
and now comfortably settled into low Earth
orbit, this new Astrophysics space telescope
has embarked on an incredible to create a
comprehensive all sky map of the universe.
What's truly revolutionary is that SphereX,
which stands for Spectro Photometer for the
History of the Universe, Epoch of
Reionization and ICES Explorer has already
begun delivering its sky survey data to a
public archive on a weekly basis. This
means anyone from professional astronomers to
curious enthusiasts can access and use this
data to unravel the universe's secrets.
As Rachel Akcsson, the lead for the SphereX
Science Data Centre, puts it, because we're
looking at everything in the whole sky,
almost every area of astronomy can be
addressed by SphereX data. While other
missions like NASA's retired WISE telescope,
also mapped the entire sky, Sphere X
significantly builds on that legacy. It
observes in an astounding 102 infrared
wavelengths, a massive leap compared to
WISE's four wavelength bands. This extensive
range allows scientists to use a technique
called spectroscopy to identify the unique
signatures of specific molecules. The
mission's science team will harness this
capability to study the distribution of
frozen water and organic molecules, often
referred to as the building blocks of life.
According to across our own Milky Way galaxy
beyond our cosmic neighbourhood. Sphere X
data will be crucial for understanding the
physics that drove the universe's rapid
expansion after the Big Bang. It will also
measure the amount of light emitted by all
galaxies over cosmic time. The decision
to make this data publicly available so
quickly, within 60 days of collection is a
testament to NASA's commitment to open
science, transparency and efficiency. It
empowers the entire astronomy community to
explore and make discoveries that the Sphere
X team alone couldn't possibly achieve.
During its two year primary mission, SphereX
will survey the entire sky twice a year,
ultimately compiling four complete all sky
maps. After the one year mark, a full map
covering all 102 wavelengths will be
released. The impact of SPHEREx extends
even further as its data can be combined with
observations from other groundbreaking
missions. Imagine refining
exoplanet parameters collected by NASA's
Tess, identifying fascinating new targets for
the James Webb Space Telescope, or studying
the properties of dark matter and dark energy
alongside the European Space Agency's Euclid
mission and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space
Telescope. The possibilities are truly
boundless. As Vandana Desai, RSS
Science Lead, wisely states, people are going
to use the data in all kinds of ways that we
can't imagine. It's an exciting time when the
universe is becoming more accessible than
ever, thanks to missions like SphereX, paving
the way for unprecedented discoveries
from the vast universe to individual
planetary systems.
Our next story takes us to a truly bizarre
discovery, an exoplanet that seems to be
actively contributing to its own demise.
Astronomers have found a doomed planet
officially named HIP67
522B, which is clinging so tightly
to its parent star that it's triggering
explosive outbursts and in turn destroying
itself. This is a completely new phenomenon
in our understanding of celestial bodies. HIP
67522B is a young
extrasolar planet orbiting an equally young
star, hip 67522, which
is only about 17 million years old. To put
that into perspective, our sun is a middle
aged 4.6 billion years old. The
exoplanet's orbit is incredibly tight,
completing a full year in just one Earth
week. Since the first exoplanets were
discovered in the mid-1990s, scientists have
wondered if a planet could orbit close enough
to impact its star's magnetic fields. With
over 5,000 exoplanet discoveries since then,
the answer remained elusive. Until now.
Ekaterina Ilien, the team leader from the
Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy,
expressed her excitement and curiosity,
stating that they had never seen a system
like HIP 67522B before,
especially one with such a young planet
orbiting so closely. She added that she had a
million questions because the details of this
new phenomenon are still unclear.
The team first identified HIP
67522B while using
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite,
or TESS, which is designed to hunt for
exoplanets and survey flaring stars.
TESS picked up some intriguing
characteristics, prompting a follow up
investigation with the European Space
Agency's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite,
or cheops. With cheops, they observed even
more flares, with almost all of them directed
towards Earth as the planet passed in front
of its star. What they discovered was
remarkable. The stellar flares thrown out by
hip 67522 occur
precisely when its clingy planet transits or
passes in front of the star. This
strongly suggests that the flares are
triggered by the planet itself. The leading
theory is that hip
67522B is so
close to its star that it exerts a
significant magnetic influence. As the planet
whips around, it gathers energy, which is
then redirected as waves rippling down the
star's magnetic field lines. When one of
these waves hits the stellar surface, it
triggers a massive flare. Ilan
explained that the waves seem to be setting
off explosions that are in essence waiting to
happen, resulting in flares with much higher
energy than the waves themselves. This
groundbreaking finding provides the first
hard evidence that planets can indeed
influence the behaviour of their stars. And
for hip 67522B, this
influence is disastrous. The induced flares
are directed right back at the planet,
bombarding it with approximately six times
the radiation a planet at this orbital
distance would typically experience.
Currently, hip 67522B is
about the size of Jupiter, but its density is
incredibly low, comparable to candy floss.
This intense radiation bombardment is
stripping away the planet's wispy outer
layers, causing it to lose what little mass
it possesses over the next hundred million
years. Circumstances scientists predict that
hip 67522B could shrink from
its current Jupiter like size to something
closer to Neptune. The full extent of the
damage from these self inflicted flares is
still uncertain. But this bizarre celestial
dance is opening up entirely new avenues for
understanding star planet interactions and
planetary evolution.
Next up, let's take a look at an anniversary
of sorts. Since July 2022,
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been
diligently focused on unlocking the
universe's secrets. And it has absolutely
delivered with its unparalleled ability to
detect and analyse invisible infrared light.
Webb has made observations once thought
impossible, profoundly changing our view of
the cosmos from the most distant galaxies
to the familiar corners of our own solar
system. Webb was built with the promise of
revolutionising astronomy and rewriting the
textbooks. And by any measure, it has far
exceeded those lofty expectations. In
just three years of science operations, Webb
has completed more than 860 scientific
programmes, collecting nearly 550
terabytes of data and leading to over
1600 research papers. The
sheer volume of intriguing results and new
questions it has raised is truly astonishing.
One of Webb's primary missions was to observe
cosmic dawn, the period during the universe's
first billion years when the earliest stars
and galaxies were forming. What scientists
expected to see were a few faint, nascent
galaxies, mere hints of what would eventually
become the grand structures we see today.
Instead, Webb revealed surprisingly bright
and mature galaxies that developed within a,
uh, mere 300 million years of the Big Bang.
It also found galaxies with black holes that
seemed far too massive for their age, and
even an infant Milky Way type galaxy that
existed when the universe was only 600
million years old. This
suggests that the universe evolves
significantly faster than we previously
thought. Adding to the surprises,
Webb has unveiled a new type of galaxy. A
distant population of mysteriously compact
bright red galaxies, affectionately dubbed
little red dots. What makes them so bright
and red? Are they illuminated by dense
groupings of unusually brilliant stars? By
gas spiralling into a supermassive black
hole? Or perhaps both. And what
eventually happened to them? These little red
dots appeared around 600 million years after
the Big Bang and rapidly declined in number
less than a billion years later, leaving
astronomers eager to understand their
evolution. Webb's observations are also
providing critical insights into one of
astronomy's most perplexing dilemmas the
Hubble tension. This refers to the
frustrating problem where different methods
of calculating the universe's current
expansion rate yield different results. Is it
simply a matter of measurement errors? Or is
there something truly strange happening in
the cosmos? So far, Webb's data
indicates that the Hubble tension is not due
to measurement inaccuracies. By
precisely distinguishing pulsating stars in
crowded fields, and even discovering a
distant gravitationally lensed supernova
whose image appeared at three different times
during its explosion, Webb is providing
independent checks on these crucial
measurements, suggesting this cosmic puzzle
is very real.
Beyond galaxies, the Webb telescope's
extraordinary infrared vision has also
unveiled surprisingly rich and varied
atmospheres on gas giants orbiting distant
stars. While the Hubble Space Telescope
made the first detection of gases on an
exoplanet, Webb has taken these studies to an
entirely new level. It's revealed a chemical
cocktail including hydrogen sulphide,
ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane
and sulphur dioxide, none of which had been
clearly detected in an atmosphere outside our
solar system before. Webb has even examined
the exotic climates of these gas giants,
detecting flakes of silica, uh, snow in the
skies of one searing hot world and measuring
temperature and cloud differences across
others. The telescope's exceptional ability
to measure subtle changes in infrared light
makes it possible to even analyse the thin
layers of gas around smaller rocky planets.
Webb has already ruled out significant
atmospheres on some rocky worlds and found
tantalising signs of carbon monoxide or
carbon dioxide on 55 Cancri E A, uh,
lava world orbiting a sun like star. These
findings are laying crucial groundwork for
NASA's future habitable worlds Observatory,
which will be designed to directly image and
search for life on Earth. Like planets.
Webb has also mapped intricate galaxy
structures with unprecedented detail, showing
us cosmic cities where stars form, live,
die and are recycled into the next
generation. Its infrared eyes reveal
delicate filaments of dust tracing spiral
arms, ancient star clusters forming galactic
cores, newly forming stars still hidden in
glowing cocoons of dust and gas, and clusters
of hot young stars carving enormous cavities
within the dust. It's truly helping us
understand how stellar winds and explosions
actively reshape their galactic homes.
In other observations, Webb has spotted
hundreds of objects resembling brown dwarfs
in the Milky Way and even some candidates in
a neighbouring galaxy. Brown dwarfs form like
stars, but aren't massive enough to fuse
hydrogen. Some of these objects are so small,
just a few times the mass of Jupiter, that
it's hard to tell if they're free floating
gas giant planets or something else entirely.
Thanks to Webb, we now know there's a
continuous spectrum of objects ranging from
planets to brown dwarfs to full fledged
stars. The telescope has also found potential
planets orbiting white dwarfs, hinting that
it might be possible for worlds to survive
the dramatic death of their host stars.
Closer to home, Webb has turned its gaze to
our own solar system with equally impressive
results. It observed the vast water plume
erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus,
revealing its true scale as a cloud spanning
over 6,000 miles, about 20 times wider
than Enceladus itself. This water then
spreads out into a donut shaped torus
encircling Saturn, even raining down onto the
planet. The these unique observations of
rings, auroras, clouds, winds,
ices and gases are helping us better
understand what our cosmic neighbourhood is
made of and how it has changed over time.
Finally, Webb has also played a crucial role
in Supporting asteroid defence missions. In
2024, when an asteroid was discovered with a
preliminary chance of hitting Earth, Webb was
uniquely able to measure the object, which
turned out to be the size of a 15 story
building, helping assess the hazard. While
that particular asteroid is no longer a
threat, the study demonstrated Webb's
capabilities. The telescope also provided
vital support for NASA's Double Asteroid
Redirection Test, or DART, mission, which
deliberately impacted the Didymos binary
asteroid system. Both Webb and Hubble
observed the impact, confirming that the
composition of these asteroids is typical of
those that could threaten Earth. In just
three years, Webb has brought the distant
universe into sharp focus, revealed
unexpectedly bright and numerous galaxies,
unveiled new stars in their dusty cocoons,
and studied weather on exoplanets. This is
only the beginning. As engineers estimate
Webb has enough fuel to continue observing
for at least 20 more years, promising many
more cosmic surprises to come.
Finally, today, in a truly unexpected turn of
events, Japanese meteorological satellites,
the Himawari 8 and 9, which are typically
used for monitoring Earth's global weather
patterns, are now providing incredibly
valuable insights into Venus's atmosphere.
These satellites, launched in 2014
and 2016 by the Japan
Meteorological Agency, are equipped with
multispectral advanced Himawari imagers.
In a recent study led by the University of
Tokyo in infrared, images from these
satellites captured changes in Venus's
atmosphere, revealing previously unseen
temperature patterns in its cloud tops. This
is a significant development because
meteorological satellites can complement
observations of Venus's atmosphere, which
usually come from robotic missions and ground
based telescopes. Scientists have been
studying Venus's atmosphere for decades to
understand the dynamics of our solar system's
hottest planet. However, many
mysteries persist, such as its thermal tides
and planetary scale waves. Dedicated
robotic probes have often been limited to
single band imagery or short observation
periods. That's where the Himawari satellites
come in. Because these satellites are
scheduled to remain operational for more than
a decade, they offer an unprecedented
opportunity for long term multi band
monitoring. Their instruments provide
infrared coverage that measures Venus's
temperature across different bands, showing
temporal variations. When these geostationary
satellites align with Earth and Venus, they
can obtain images of Venus's turbulent
atmosphere, helping to fill crucial
observational gaps. The team behind the
study used hundreds of images from Himawari 8
and 9 to map the temporal dynamics and track
temperature variations in Venus's cloud tops
over time. Their analysis confirmed that both
the thermal tides and planetary waves in
Venus's atmosphere are subject to changes in
amplitude over time, which decrease with
altitude. This novel approach opens
new avenues for long term and multiband
monitoring of other solar system bodies,
including the Moon and Mercury. By
providing continuous data that dedicated
missions might miss due to their shorter
lifespans, these Earth focused satellites are
unexpectedly contributing to our broader
understanding of planetary evolution.
That's all for this episode of Astronomy
Daily. I'm Anna and I hope you enjoyed our
journey through the latest in space and
astronomy news. Thank you for tuning in. If
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